YAGNI is such a powerful philosophy that I think within reason you should look at it as a hypothesis to disprove on every new thing that you work on. It's real

YAGNI is such a powerful philosophy that I think within reason you should look at it as a hypothesis to disprove on every new thing that you work on. It's really difficult advice to follow because, very often, the thing you don't need is actually quite fun to work on. You start out wanting to work on it, so the hypothesis becomes flipped: "why shouldn't I build this", or, "If I can build this, I should". Focusing on the category of things that fall under 'optimizations', the key here is that the problems they solve are not the problems you have when you launch something, and you will only have them at all if your thing is a significant success. They're nice problems to have. I wrote a short blog post on this theme recently: https://davnicwil.com/if-its-a-nice-problem-to-have-dont-solve-it-now/ https://davnicwil.com/if-its-a-nice-problem-to-have-dont-sol...